The Bones of the Saints Cannot Withstand It
An Interpretation of Parts 1 & 2 of Marx’s Capital Volume 1
“Time is like money and money is like blood and time turns blood to dust.” – Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
A fable of ancient peoples tells of the manner by which a race of giants exercised their dominion over the land through the burial of their dead. This institution may have been born of a practical necessity, by the unviability of life to be lived among gathered corpses, but its ordering of human life and death, of species and earth, soon gave rise to a function beyond the immediate senses. The rite of burial formed an axis of gravity for a bounded territory, and the exclusivity of the giants’ rule over that territory. The cemetery becomes a demonstration of history’s accumulation against time, and from this emerges a notion of the immortality of the human soul. Their relationships with the divine, however, were not permitted to all. In what becomes untenable about this abstract notion of the human being, a prior distinction is encountered, and what becomes one in the abstraction appears formed by a difference that has come to confront its identification. What more could the grounds of the dead have to tell us?
Such civil institutions have always found an expression of their social functions and utility through the crafting of imprints in what nature has provided, ready at hand. The history of marriage rites likewise involves an arrangement of human biological reproduction, an evolution that found its modern expression in the historical continuity of property, descending from and adapting another aspect of dominion’s transmission — the ancient rites’ instrument transformation into an instrument of Right. What develops from this distinction of the social and the natural tends to involve a peculiar eclipsing of their separation that inverts this unity, the interdependence of these forms restated as an opposition, and social life naturalized as the natural world is rendered anthropomorphic. Institutional creations of civil life leverage this utility and function to conceal the essence of this interaction, and seldom do the agentive movements within these vehicles of human actualization are conscious of what they’re doing. It may be the case that these fabular origins are themselves reconstructions conducted through a veil worn by our own time, where the disenchanted objects of a secularized world still bear a hieroglyphic that cannot be seen by us, yet nevertheless we conduct our affairs as if we have been trained to abide by its commands.
This introduces the fetishism of the commodity, an old tale that bears repeating, though with a new idea as to its secret. These insufficient retellings of institutional origins aim at orienting us towards what the commodity fetish bases its manifestation upon, the historical process that has woven this connection of human-consciousness as the inverted self-representation of its conditions of existence. It is one matter to note something that appears contradictory of a world in which mutually interdependent arrangements operate upon the assumption of private gain that brings all parties together, yet none are conscious of it in their actions.
However, our confusion may rather be in the knowledge that this appears perfectly coherent to so many. If this is the case, then what if this appearance can bring us to the investigation of a logic that relates to a movement, invisible, hidden from us, occurring behind our backs? To resist its aspirations to permanence, we must not seek a readily available answer, to become permanently applicable itself. Rather, this movement of critical investigation cannot begin by examining a fixed whole if it intends to apprehend the nature of that whole. To do so would merely supply us with the illusion of the creativity of our conceptual production, meanwhile all we have done is conducted thought or the terms of this one form–we have been caught up in its current. Beginning with the moments of this whole, those parts animating it on and beneath the unity of its surface, we learn how to displace the fixity of its shape, the certainty of its reason.
This brings us to address an old question directed at Marx: why begin with the commodity? His answer is only communicated through a movement of negativity, through an exposition that illustrates to us this form of an object by way of demonstrating to us the limits of what it can account for; where the terms of its own existence demands of us a leap in thought once the form’s own tongue has been struck dumb.
For we learn from the commodity’s distinct existence from the product of labor itself that we are dealing with a language of its own, and one that appears to speak from both sides of its mouth. We learn by custom and training to relate the products of our labor to each other not only as objects of utility, but as equivalences, and this latter yet produces another aspect of this form’s grammar. It is a language born of our own bodies and minds, and the unity of their relation in a dialectic with what of the world we encounter that lies beyond the limit established in the human’s species-being. The commodity takes as its basis this condition of social metabolism and mediates it such that the product of labor takes on a life distinct from the quality of its physical form.
More than fulfilling the practical utility of any need or desire, any want or compulsion, an object is a commodity once it bears a value for the purpose of making it exchangeable with any other article, and this is an existence of the commodity separate form, but dependent on the movement of, its life as something to be used. The form of the commodity at the outset shows a tension internal to itself, its incoherence of quality and quantity requiring conceptual resolution that does not merely posit one aspect of this form of value as true in-itself. For in value’s appearance is either a definite use or some amount of equivalence, we are dealing with interdependent functions posed in antagonism, both of these aspects having a definite historical character.
The sublation of these moments is what brings us to the question of the peculiar form of labor that produces commodities, for it is this active origin to which this form owes its dual character. A definite act of labor creates a definite article of utility, an object with a purpose for its owner, and we take this specificity of the labor task to be concrete labor, for it has, in practice, synthesized a convergence of many determinations. Yet it is as human labor that it is intelligible to all other acts as such, and this fact is revealed through the ability of commodities to be exchanged with each other.
Human labor, in the abstract, is revealed to be the social substance of the commodity’s form of value, and it is an abstraction of the living unity of concrete labors that relate to each other through the exchange of their products. This equality of human labor, however, is not the conscious expression by which this process represents itself. As any denizen of the capitalist mode of production knows, the commodity form of value expresses equivalence in the money form of value, and it is from this dual character of commodity-producing labor that Marx seeks to identify the logical consequence of the money form from the form of the commodity.
This problem can only be solved by another movement of conceptual production, as abstract labor must obtain in some motion that mediates the exchange of commodities, some basis of equivalence. That all products of labor’s creation must involve a definite duration of this activity, an expenditure of energy, labor-time comes as a moment of the investigation, though it may no sooner arrive there than it must reveal a definite relation to temporality, since exchange is not established by any direct reference to labor-time, but in money’s autonomous representation of value’s quantity. Likewise, concrete labors can only be mediated in a relation of equivalence if there exists some basis to evaluate their duration, the efficacy of their actions in relation to each other, for the economy of time understands the necessity of its movements through this social articulation of its dialectical metabolism of body and world.
Socially necessary labor-time is then a logical cohesion of the disparate and scattered sites from which commodities are made, in a transit to the moment in which they are exchanged, at which point this temporal formation makes itself felt in the tumult and force of competition and prices, though its determination of value’s magnitude indicates a relation prior to the price that sets the terms of exchange.
We come to find in our cemetery, maneuverings of flight in flashes, the stalking presence of two ghosts — the commodified object as a constellating unity of social relations, and Jeremy Bentham. Bentham tells us from beyond the grave of the natural basis of the individuals who have yet to find this movement occurring behind their backs, and repeat its incantation amongst the world of the living. In and through the interaction of the relations animating the appearances of these propositions is a form of time’s institution in a language that is derived from the dialectic of our social metabolism. We have yet to learn of how this foundation of the content of value has come to inform the notions of Freedom, Equality, and Property that are projected back into an eternity in the name of these dead.
Only the products of mutually independent acts of labor, performed in isolation, can confront each other as commodities. The commodity emerges as a form mediating the qualitative difference of use-values and concrete labors through an equivalence of quantity established in exchange by the force exerted by socially necessary labor-time through their relation as abstract social labor. The productivity of labor operates within the limits established here, and the dual character of labor as both abstract and concrete finds itself in a dialectical tension, form dominating content, content threatening to exceed the phrase of form, always posing challenges.
Despite this, or rather because of, the discovery of this contradiction, a question comes to guide an exposition: how is it that this form of value comes to dominate our social metabolism such that the realization of exchange-value appears as its defining objective?
This begins the coterminous co-dependent development of money from commodity, introduced as a solution to the riddle of money. Two commodities encountering each other in a simple form of value, x commodity A = y commodity B, reveals two poles of expression, two distinct forms in their meeting. For one, the value of one commodity can only be expressed relative to an other, and subsequently this relation compels into the other commodity an equivalence with itself. Relating two commodities together in a value-relation creates two states of the product, its physical body and its suprasensual existence as a value. This relation’s equality is established upon a social substance of abstract labor that in turn mediates a differentiation of content while binding these products as values.
From this, the prior force of socially necessary labor-time's determination of magnitude is exerted upon the products, but only through their mutual isolations from each other, and a series of inversions take hold. Use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite value, exchange-value. Concrete labor becomes the form in which abstract labor is manifest. Private labor becomes labor in its directly social form.
In this series of contradictory appearances of the world of commodities, the simple form of value is implicitly infinitely exchangeable, and this is the freedom we encounter in the marketplace. However, as the magnitude of value dictated by socially-necessary labor-time regulates the proportions of exchange, this movement resolves itself in a sublation into a particular equivalent form that takes on the general form of value in the money commodity, one chosen by custom and which carries, in this logical cohesion of social form, the burden of political history. For in the money commodity, the interdependence of value’s formal expressions finds a formally coherent material expression in a direct incarnation of abstract social labor as universal equivalent — that is, wealth rendered universally alienable.
The mediation of social metabolism through sale and purchase in this process of exchange moves social wealth only insofar as it can be made to appear to us all as a property apart from us, its origins out of sight, and our own labors socially valid in so far as they cease to be our concern once they have been transmuted into money. We are all rendered instruments to each other as we only relate to the activity of ourselves and others in a form that vanishes from view the process of creation.
The fetishism of the commodity then is simply the natural expression of this social organization of human labor, and the mysterious qualities of its contradictions are stripped away when we discover that this is the arrangement of our social relating. As the money fetish and the commodity fetish converge to reveal value’s ventriloquism of social labor as an individual actor, a notion of an illusion at play occurs to us, yet we are no sooner capable of casting it off, despite what we may recognize in concept, and what we may communicate of its deceptive qualities.
This problem occurs because not only is this fetish a challenge to consciousness, but it arises within consciousness as a force independent of the individual’s will, interwoven into our universal expressions of value. Encountering this as a consequence of our conditions for social relation, we come to understand that contending with the fetishism of the commodity is not a matter of persuading others or ourselves, though this may appear a moment of it. It is not ideological, though it permeates all expression of ideology. The language of commodities is a corporeal organization of a corporeal imagination, a product of self-making that, in the binding of socially necessary labor-time’s force, reveals to us its secret — that we find ourselves within forms of obligation that reproduce these forms of social relation.
As much a product of human social activity as language is, the commodity, brought into this analogy, can be understood in relation to an ideation of the object with the unity of the organization of its conditions, of what makes the product, itself a determinate unity of active relations, fluent in this dialect of valuation. These conditions themselves speak through the categories of which have obtained them as names in the process of abstraction, the social refinement of speech in practices that are contending with a definite material life, just as their articulations aim to grasp these conditions as something to be wielded. Mind and body are one in their distinction through this metabolic process in the world, yet their distinction betrays something of the language we have developed to engage this separation that is presupposed in concept and only reaffirmed by its maintenance in practice.
This is the commodity’s obligation, which is further developed in money’s responsibilities. Yet there remains a way in which these ties that bind introduce the always present possibility of an obligation counter to their own necessities, just as they continually establish them in process, and this begins the secret of the commodity’s fetish.
As time passes and the categories of bourgeois economy present themselves in the guise of a natural force, Marx tells us of an element that dispels us of this illusion, breaks the spell of its necromancy, and that disenchantment is our coming to face other forms of production. How is it that something appearing as an external intrusion into the presentation’s logical immanence reveals itself as something already given in what the critique has unfolded?
The historical actuality of the commodity’s form is most apparent in the presence of social necessity in the compulsion exacted by and upon labor-times brought to bear upon exchange’s made of social recognition. The indirect presence in which this rhythm of production is felt makes known the prior necessity of a formation preceding price, where the cost of action is in motion before its momentary petrification. And in fact, a ledger of prices may make obvious to us what we are searching for here, that values and their formation possess a history, and socially necessary labor-time is the mediation of the historical development of a form of productivity, one that has culminated in the commodity and capital, but is not bound to these forms forever. That these categories are bearers of a history themselves means that their relationship as articulators of the metabolism of human labor and nature’s materials is not an eternal necessity, the very independence from natural constraints a testament to this. The content of this history becomes just as essential as the forms that reflexively make themselves out to be the summit of that history.
As value as such is distinct from the commodity form of value, the money form’s development is of materials not only bound up in the evolution of customs, but also acts as the institutional formalization of such practices. Money’s history as the general form of value has its particular history in currency, its moments enunciated by the State. Money precedes the capitalist form of state via the origin in the commodity, but currency arises as a necessary dimension of its social validation and continuity. This distinction of value’s constitutive antagonisms begin to reveal the problematic division of the political and the economic, though the particularity of political history appears a challenge to the formalization of the institutional form of the State to capital’s valorization, and the antagonism between categories is a reflection of a struggle in practice.
Money mediates social metabolism as the metamorphosis of commodities, and the form of State is subsumed as a constitutive limit of this movement. The subsumption of this social form, the State, is such that it becomes a necessary moment and precondition of the capitalist mode of production. The State can illuminate for us an orientation towards a universal history counter to and within the capitalist mode of production.
This proceeds by way of a simple contradiction. The State’s assumption as the arbiter and mediator of a general good, a public interest, appears at odds with its role in mediating the reproduction of capital through its formation of money’s particular incarnations of abstract social labor. If money bears this as its essence, why does the civil institution form this incarnation in particular moments? Money’s transformation into capital is key in this reconstruction, for it is the money form’s ability to effect equivalence that makes practical the abstraction of labor and its conditions, eclipsing, yet not absolving them of, their qualitative differences. This in turn makes the practical possibility of organizing a logic of differentiation in quantity and magnitude, expressed as the aim of production as the valorization of value, or surplus value.
Surplus value is not an independent creation of and from these conditions, but arises from this conflicting inversion of differentiations, as it also falls back upon them, based upon what is found at hand, subsuming through this logic’s mediation. Marx, however, wants to reveal a peculiar fact to us in these chapters, and that is the impossibility of surplus value to be accounted for within the immediate realm of appearance in the sphere of circulation, though it clearly must be necessarily expressed within it. The commodity form assumes an exchange of equivalents, and it is the money form that mediates their presupposition while also giving shape to the expansion of previous sums of value. In order for this to be possible on the terms of circulation, there must exist some commodity that can be purchased in the market whose very use-value consumption is the creation of value. As we know value’s social substance to be human labor in the abstract, surplus value’s substantialization enacts a further abstraction in the conceptual development of the commodity labor-power. This is a capacity to labor that is distinct from the labor itself, a separation of body and intention prior to any act itself. It only exists insofar as this alienation of labor from labor-power, its capacity, pertains and can be put into practice. That is, its availability on the market, as is any other commodity’s, is not guaranteed–this condition must be reproduced.
The full operation of this relation gives rise to another dimension of the fetishism of the commodity. Capital as value, money, in the process of its self-expansion gives value the appearance of being a subjective agent itself. A social metabolism universally mediated through animating social action on the condition of separating its intent from its capacity can only appear back to us in the form of an alien other.
The limitlessness of this logic, however, contains within it an action against itself, for the limitlessness is one of pure self-relation. Its relation to the infinite both internally constitutes and devastates external obstacles. If there is a way of detecting the error in this logic of expansion, it is a critique posed from within the living matter of its social substance, and this comes to form the counterpoint to the historical content which introduces the state as an institutional mediation in the history of the capitalist mode of production, for the true arrival of this mode of production out of the history of preceding forms of capital is ordained by the advent of the free worker.
The criterion of the free worker is one still baffling to Marxism, its historiography still relying on a historical empiricism of wage labor’s appearance to name it such. What is adopted here is but the initial moment of the market’s negative freedom, the worker as free because the worker is dispossessed of all but their capacity to labor. What we do not see is what the State and Capital have instituted themselves upon — not an oppression to guarantee exploitation based on total subjugation, but a rule based on the recognition of this living particularity of value’s appearance as subjective agent in our own hands, for the free worker is only that subject who recognizes his or her self as the free proprietor of their own person and labor-capacity. In the historical reconstruction of this subject, the free worker is not only the dispossessed, but just as easily the dispossessor of ancient forms of bonded labor.
To see the wage as a form always enacted by capital and as the condition of free labor leads us into the arms of capitalism’s embrace of progress, where we no sooner recognize necessity than concede its terms. What we must learn to see in a history made universal through capitalist subsumption is a history of past struggle not erased or vanished, but still born in the always mediated units of labor and its conditions of existence. The commodity form itself struggles to contain labor’s self-emancipation, while itself being a moment in this possibility’s formation, and capital is a name for a form by which this self-activity of creation is harnessed, using its momentum on the means of keeping its logical development indefinitely at bay.
A negative image of this necessity is made known in the possibility of crises that is a consequence of the form’s divergence of price and value, a non-correspondence that maintains its resonance in capital through the coherence of money’s expression of surplus value, so long as the successful exchange realizes its social validity. The separation of labor’s activity from its intention echoes throughout the ensemble of social relations into the appearance of circulation as autonomous sphere of movement, the product fulfilling its obligation as commodity so long as the antithetical movement of sale and purchase takes place, and money’s isolated appearance, unmoored form the body of the object as commodity, nevertheless fulfills this form in its own movement of self-expansion.
The social arrangement of the material world thus finds all commitments to its ordering arbitrary unless the criterion of profit-making can be filled. All commodities can be quickly rendered into waste or disintegration so long as their monetary value has been secured, and this movement increases its pace to adapt to the relentless pressures of this self-expansion’s imperatives. Limitlessness comes to express eternal life in a spectral, alienated form of being, to be wielded as the private property of its appropriator.
The nature of this privation is the axis upon which our contestation of universal history is staged. The continued necessity of the State, far from being anachronistic, is not reliant upon solely wielding any monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In fact, the settler-colonial phases of capitalist accumulation bear out this willingness of the capitalist state to outsource its own agendas, often in ways that exceed and overcome its limits. In this is revealed the nation as a particular form of State whose formation as an equality of mutual isolation corresponds with the commodity’s social-cellular biology. This subsumption of the State, however, to the generalization of form brings to light the transforming dramatis personae that conclude Marx’s presentation of circulation’s antinomies, for the hidden abode of production is where we find the relations of a marketplace in which labor-power is found for sale to be constituted within and between the polarity of capitalist and worker, and the arrival of this polarization as a universal form in the actuality of the capitalist mode of production reconstructs history as the history of class struggle.
Yet we cannot be content to let history rest here, for this is still a condition that political economy acknowledges. What do we have at the stage of methodological development at present to construct our own determinate negation?
It is still early, but our gamble is on the faint glimmers we have shown thus far. History’s resurrection begins to show itself in the commodity’s negation of labor capacity from labor, as the positing of labor’s creative self-activity as a condition of its social metabolism. With the free worker as founder of surplus value, capital’s undoing becomes immanent to its requirements. This in turn stages another confrontation in the question of the content of the worker’s freedom, for we are contending with a social form that prides itself on espousing convictions to freedom openly, and appears to fear not this cry.
The beginning of its challenge lies in its logic of temporality undergirded by socially necessary labor-time and what its investigation tells us, as the commodity labor-power must have its own price, and thus a determination in the magnitude of its value. This quantity bears a moral and a historical imprint, and it thus stamps all commodities with the seal of this history in need, subsistence, the living movements of conditions of being past, present, and future. Thus, the worker’s own history of reproduction is the possibility of surplus value’s disrupted continuity in the finitude of the worker’s life.
Capital is only limitless insofar as the free worker can be reproduced and yoked to its movement, reproducing the world in capital’s image by reproducing its own constitutive separation. It is the very finitude of the worker’s life that will come to encounter capital’s expression of eternal life as an opposition to it, for this sociality reveals itself as little more than the public spectacle of its own mangled corpse.
Our transience in relation to capital’s alien eternity reveals the worker as not merely worker, but as a proletarian, the amputation of capital’s operation. A counterhistory of capital’s overcoming may be possible in the identification of labor’s self-activity, but it can only proceed by way of confronting this subsumption of the proletarian condition of being into capital’s longevity, where the human animation is neither guaranteed nor preserved in its consumption, but returned to it in alienated form, as money to be exchanged for commodities. The disposability of labor-power’s vessels becomes the stuff of capital’s crises, underneath their fetish forms of appearance, and in this the worker’s freedom must be one that understands its origins if it indeed seeks its own redemption.
The transience of proletarian demise becomes a condition of the incitement of a historical existence, and this temporal intervention destabilizes the commodity’s reality, its fetish forced to confront its own condition of being mediated by various articulations of social necessity, and their implicit obligations. The manifestation of this actuality of transience and demise as a logical consequence of the capitalist mode of production must violate some condition of the proletarian’s freedom, in the prematurity of what has been cut short, and its action as an alien will.
The de-fetishizing operation of this shock in the economic reality of force conducts a transformation in the conscious apprehension of the commodity’s relations. The compulsion of alienation and demise as an economic force tests the belief of the free proletarian in the commodity as a corporeal imagination of social being, and the notion of what is at stake in value, our terms of evaluation, undergoes a crisis of faith. This crisis is necessarily encountered in the divinity aspired to in capital’s secularization of eternal life, for value’s inverted image of social labor incarnated as private property, universally alienable wealth, in the money form lives on beyond us as we struggle to find within it a means of preserving our own lives.
Yet if life is to be preserved with its form, we concede to a loss of ourselves and the continuation of our separation from our own capacities, to be consumed and destroyed again. Only by submitting ourselves to the loss of what is made of life through the forms of commodity and money will life be saved, allowed a substantive freedom of its own choosing.
Revolutionary action emanates from this spatial and temporal encounter with history that the proletarian subject must be made to experience from within, recognizing itself in the economy of stolen life as its redeemer. The language of argument and persuasion, of ideology-critique, can only arouse what has been imprinted in consciousness by experience and practice. That is why the direct violence of capital’s civic institutions so often necessarily catalyzes revolt, for these institutions are bearers of a continuity of accumulated history exploited by capital to its advantage, as much as it aims to obscure what is uncovered. What is preserved in the memory of labor’s collective self-activity as the vulgar history of proletarian self-defense forms the counterhistory, the content of the impossibility of mutual accommodation in the capital-relation, and it learns that what lies before it is a tradition of sacrifice to the end of emancipation from which its own salvation can only arise.
The formal obligation of socially necessary labor-time is the beating pulse in the heart of the value form stamping it as historical, a history of production, thus necessitating the obligation to the history of past struggles. Social metabolism compels transformation, but it must be contended with by a unified consciousness, so that the history of sacrifices reluctantly made, whether stolen or given, be the seeds for which we must till the good ground, our burials and mourning a claim on the dominion of the future. The bones of the saints cannot withstand capital’s centrifugal subsumption of all that exists, but their resurrection will shake the earth upon which its transactions are made.